


The Wolf Trap Tapes

by orphan_account



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Documentary AU, F/F, Horror, Masochistic Tendencies Group Chat Fic Swap August 2015, The Poughkeepsie Tapes AU, though seeing the original movie is not necessary to read the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-08
Updated: 2015-08-08
Packaged: 2018-04-13 13:43:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4524222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the FBI found hundreds of hours of footage of torture and murder left for them in the Baltimore home of the Vergers, the most recent victims in a string of killings by the notorious Chesapeake Ripper, they set Will Graham to the task of watching and analyzing the Ripper's tapes. However, after Will Graham's abduction by the same killer who took the lives of the Vergers as well as young Abigail Hobbs, Alanna Bloom takes up the analysis of the tapes: both the tapes found in Baltimore and the Wolf Trap Tapes left in the home of Will Graham.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One: The Baltimore Tapes

Alana shifted in her chair and looked into the camera. The reflections of the couch and her own gray suit warped in the blue-black curve of the lens. 

“I’ve analyzed the tapes for over three years,” Alana began. A microphone tech scurried through the metal web of tripod legs and microphone poles and cameras arranged across from where she sat. “I use them in the classes I teach at the FBI Academy.”

“What’s the worst part of the tapes?” the interviewer asked with a sharp smile under her meticulous red curls. Alana knew Freddie Lounds as a crime tabloid journalist and occasional obstruction of justice, but she had apparently been promoted to the position of documentary filmmaker. Naturally, Lounds led the documentary with an eye for sensationalism and drama that Alana didn’t appreciate.

“It’s hard to say what was the worst. Every tape shows incredible cruelty,” she dodged. “Though I approach the project with professionalism, the Wolf Trap Tapes, personally, are more difficult to watch than the Baltimore Tapes.”

“Why is that?” the interviewer asked.

“The agent who preceded me in analyzing the tapes was my coworker, Will Graham. He was abducted by the Chesapeake Ripper three months after he began the project. The Wolf Trap Tapes depict his torture at the hands of the Ripper.” Alana replied with the explanation she gave to her students at the beginning of every semester. Rehearsal made it easier.

“And Mr. Graham took his own life about a month ago after being discharged from the hospital?” 

Alana took a breath. She hated the way that Lounds was suppressing a grin. “Yes, that’s true,” she replied.

......  


“Could you introduce yourself?” Freddie asked. She had finagled an interview in the glinting stainless-steel morgue, with the doctor standing behind a table of scalpels and kitchen knives.

“I’m Dr. Zeller, and I’ve been working on the Chesapeake Ripper case for about three years. I chose to do this interview because I want everyone to know that Jack Crawford was innocent.” Zeller explained. Freddie smiled and it was a slick of red lipstick across her mouth. She adored when her subjects did the work for her.

“Dr. Zeller, what was the scene like at the home in Baltimore where you found the tapes?”

Zeller folded his hands in front of his lap and launched into an explanation, complete with the relish for gore and disturbing details that coroners and crime journalists shared. 

The Chesapeake Ripper’s signature had always been displaying his victims in gruesome and creative ways around Baltimore and the surrounding area, but he had prepared a special exhibit at a home outside the city when he led the FBI to its doors. Dr. Zeller explained that he and Dr. Price had been called in by Agent Crawford to examine two bodies: a woman and a man, the Verger siblings, who owned the mansion in which they died. 

The woman, Margot Verger, had been pregnant at the time of her death. The killer murdered her first, then removed the fetus inside of her. With his specialty precision, the Ripper then sewed shut the incision of his odd C section; removed her brother, Mason Verger’s, intestines; and nestled the fetus among his cooling organs. Once he had repaired Mason’s wounds as well, the Ripper decapitated him and replaced the fetus with his head. The Ripper displayed the Vergers side-by-side in Mason’s bed and, at their feet, gifted the FBI with the Baltimore Tapes tied up in ribbon--or, rather, sprigs of white asphodel and four meters of Mason Verger’s intestines. He had used the other two meters to make sausage out of Mason’s hands and forearms, which he fed to Mason minutes before killing him.

Freddie Lounds did not react to Zeller’s description. She had read every piece of information on the Baltimore Tapes that money could buy, and she was already thinking about how they could edit this interview into something punchier than the doctor’s wordy nerdspeak. 

“Let’s discuss the killer’s M.O. now,” Freddie suggested. “Start with why it has been so hard to catch him.” Grisly details were central to the success of any crime documentary, and cannibalism was about as grisly as it could get. 

Zeller began using the knives to describe the Ripper’s methods. He held up a scalpel to illustrate the way the Ripper performed his dismemberments and sculpting with surgical precision, or the careful hands of a fine butcher; the kitchen knives were a demonstration of what he did with the body parts of his victims after they were dead--or before, if they were as unlucky as Mason Verger.

Of course, none of the weapons actually belonged to the Chesapeake Ripper. He never left evidence he didn’t want the FBI to find. That’s why he was so damn hard to catch. 

…..

The blanket smelled as much like wine as the wine did. Alana gratefully took a sip and pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders with her free hand. Snow piled on the roof of her car and had already coated Beverly’s with at least an inch of white powder. The sunlight filtered weak and gray into the darkened living room.

Beverly switched on the light and brought her own glass of wine into the kitchen. She wore Alana’s faded Washington Nationals sweatshirt.

“You can’t leave work early and sulk every time Freddie Lounds is on the prowl,” Beverly said as she settled on the couch beside Alana. Beverly didn’t officially live in Alana’s apartment, but she barely lived in her own and she had a designated place on the brown sofa.

“I’m not sulking,” Alana countered. She took a long drink of wine.

“I knew you were sulking so I opened up your favorite red,” Beverly continued.

“How have you avoided Lounds so far?” Alana changed the subject.

Beverly began to card her fingers through Alana’s hair and Alana leaned into the touch. 

“I’m always in the creepy basement with all the dead people,” Beverly replied with a grin.

“That would never stop her.” Alana countered.

Beverly smiled and Alana returned it. “She had Price yesterday, and captured Zeller when I was leaving work early today. It’s a matter of time.”

“You make it sound like she’s killing her interview subjects.”

“You seem to think so.”

“She was asking about Will, which I expected, since this is about him and Jack. But I hate the way she’s doing it. It’s a spectacle for her. It’s something that people will watch for the shock value and she’ll laugh while she’s cashing her paycheck,” Alana spat. Beverly’s hand stilled in her hair. “She’ll want to know about Abigail Hobbs, and what it was like when we found Will, and when we found out Jack was innocent. I don’t want to do this again.”

Alana kept a straight face the whole time. “You don’t have to do any of that,” Beverly replied quietly. “We can do the talking for you. Every time Lounds asks you for an interview, send her to me.” 

Alana cracked a small smile, but her expression was still despairing. “Bev, she makes me want to pull out the boxes and watch every tape again and spread all the photos out on the floor.”

“I know, but you’ve got to leave it at work or it will drive you crazy, just like you tell your students. It wasn’t fun the last time you were staying up all night with those tapes,” Bev set her wineglass on the coffee table and put her arms around Alana’s shoulders. Alana awkwardly set down her own wine as well so she could lean against her girlfriend. Beverly smelled like her subtle lavender-and-sage shampoo and the inoffensive smell of clothes newly washed with unscented detergent. She and Beverly had been dating for a year and a half and, despite the arduous and obnoxious process of declaring their relationship status to the FBI, had gone remarkably well. As long as Beverly left the bodies in the morgue and Alana left the tapes in the classroom, they could remain sane.

“You’re right,” Alana conceded, her voice muffled by Beverly’s sweatshirt.

“What did you say?” Beverly asked. She leaned back and Alanna lifted her chin to get her face out of the fabric.

“I said ‘you’re right,’” Alana repeated. Beverly smiled and leaned down to kiss her; Bev slipped her other hand under Alana’s hair to cup the back of her head, and Alana realized that might have been a ruse to get a kiss. Alana smiled against Beverly’s lips.


	2. Part Two: First Blood

Cut to a school photograph of Abigail Hobbs: junior year, her last year at school before her abduction. Photos of her and her father at a childhood birthday party. A brief voice-over description of Abigail as a reserved but intelligent and precocious girl. Then lead into the interview with Price. 

Perfect. Freddie surreptitiously made a note in her phone while Price fidgeted in front of the camera. She wasn’t able to reserve the morgue for the interview, so she, Price, and the small tech and camera crew crowded into a small conference room upstairs. Unfortunate, too, because Freddie had seen Dr. Katz’s car in the parking lot, and wanted to corner her for an interview.

“We found the evidence of Abigail Hobbs’s abduction on the Baltimore Tapes, and of her murder on the Wolf Trap Tapes,” Price began. 

Freddie remembered watching the leaked footage of the very first Baltimore Tape. The tape didn’t include Abigail’s abduction like some of the other victims, but it did show her first meal with the Ripper: cuts of her own father’s liver. 

The Ripper liked to feed Abigail elaborate dishes in his grand dining room--FBI analysts agreed that he was a classically-trained chef, perhaps even professionally-trained somewhere like France or Italy. Every murder brought a fresh, fine cut of meat to their table. And, after a month or so, the killer encouraged Abigail to participate in the butchering.

She looked terrified the first time. The camera had been trained on the victim as she stood behind him under the ruse of refilling his wineglass. However, she held a knife rather than a wine bottle, and she poured blood from his jugular rather than Cabernet into his glass. The FBI had hypothesized that she was unable to complete the killing and needed assistance from the Ripper, but he had later cut the footage to prevent revealing his identity on camera. The next scene on the tape showed the victim staining the rug with blood from a dark wound that ringed his throat like a second collar, and only a pair of fine leather shoes at the edge of the frame to give any indication that the Ripper had been there at all. The two of them ate his heart and brain, and the next time Abigail killed she did not hesitate. 

“Could you discuss her death? How was she killed?” Freddie asked. Of course, they would include the footage itself, but this could make a good voice-over. Price was maybe more boring than Zeller, but he was more articulate. 

Price crossed his arms as if it had gotten colder in the room. “She was killed by Will Graham under the orders of the Chesapeake Ripper,” Price replied with a determined effort not to show emotion. Freddie almost smiled. This is what she had been waiting for.

“I understand that this is difficult, but I’m curious about Will Graham. How could the Ripper possibly convince him to kill a child?” Freddie asked with an expression she hoped was well-meaning--though she was out of practice and she couldn’t be sure.


	3. Part Three: The Wolf Trapp Tapes

Will Graham had been missing for a year when Jack Crawford was executed. Brian Zeller was the one who first read the map and note from the Chesapeake Ripper after it had been examined for explosives and biological agents. Beverly Katz was the first one to realize what it meant. Jack Crawford had been dead for twenty-three hours when he was proven innocent.

The clean parchment envelope contained a map on which the Chesapeake Ripper’s kills had been marked, along with one the FBI had yet to unearth. In meticulous calligraphy, the note read just two words: missed one. Jack Crawford had been in jail for months. Jack Crawford was dead. The first thing the forensic team did was phone up the ranks and get a team sent to the crime scene indicated on the map.

After the SWAT team had searched Will Graham’s home, Alana stepped out of the van into a cold November afternoon. She hadn’t been to Will’s house since she came to take home his dogs a year previous; it had stood empty, first as evidence and then because no one wanted to purchase a home from which an FBI analyst had been abducted. Or maybe because it was located, as Beverly had once said, in “jack-shit nowhere, I don’t understand how Will does it.” 

Alana had been called to the scene as the expert on the Chesapeake Ripper’s tapes. She had been analyzing and teaching FBI academy students with the Baltimore tapes for years, and she was the only one who had watched all two thousand, four hundred hours of footage: over two thousand hours of mostly dismemberment and, oddly, the victims eating meals prepared by the killer. Sometimes their own flesh, sometimes the flesh of others; sometimes in distress as they knew their own deaths were imminent, sometimes calmly and dressed well for a dinner party with a friend. Eating was an obsession; a preoccupation; maybe even a fetish to him.

The evidence was all right there on those tapes. The Chesapeake Ripper gave them everything they might need to catch him--but there was nothing until the FBI found Jack Crawford’s fingerprints on a left-behind scalpel and his flesh under the fingernails of a victim. 

Alana entered the familiar house through the creaking wooden door. A gust of wind followed her in and she thought she smelled dog fur and Will’s pretentious beer mixed in with the odors of pine and cold wintertime vacancy. She had begun many evenings of wine and friendship by walking through that door. She had spoken to Beverly for the first time outside work at Will’s home. She became close with Jack while sitting on Will’s couch. Wolf Trap was her personal symbol of all things long gone. 

That time, six cardboard boxes covered the trapdoor to the crawlspace, just to the right of the stairs. The SWAT teams had scattered all the lids of the boxes around on the wood floor and Alana could see rows of black tapes stacked inside. How many hours? Two thousand? Three thousand? More than that? Couldn’t the Chesapeake Ripper be courteous and switch to some goddamn DVDs? Alana shook her head at the thought of all the hours of analysis she would have to do.

A knock sounded from beneath the boxes and Alana jumped. She quickly scanned the room: Price and Zeller were walking through the door behind her and assorted SWAT team members still filtered through the living room. She assumed one of them must have made the noise until the knock repeated several times and she rushed to grab Price and Zeller and move the boxes out of the way of the crawlspace door. SWAT agents hurried to inspect the crawl space before Alana could look in. 

It would have been a couple minutes before Alana saw Will again, but in her mind the SWAT team looked into the crawlspace and then Will was strapped to an orange stretcher, and then Beverly and Alana were watching the ambulance disappear in a clutter of red and blue lights from Will’s porch, and then she stood beside his bed in the hospital. He bore no visible physical injuries, but they kept him in the hospital because he had already attempted suicide by the time Alana visited.

Will did not speak for three days. When he did, he confirmed what everyone already knew: that Jack Crawford was innocent and that Will Graham was already dead.


	4. Part Four: Will Graham

Freddie had been sitting with her laptop propped on her thighs for so long that the light in her apartment had gone from orange to black without Freddie getting up to turn on a lamp. But the bottom of the laptop warmed her legs and she had emptied a half-pint of Cherry Garcia and didn’t plan on getting up until her wine glass was empty, too.

She paused the video of Will Graham again to make a note on her iPad. Freddie would be using the footage in her documentary, but she wished she had been able to get footage for herself. The interviewers hadn’t even been able to get a nicer camera to film one of the most important interviews in true crime history? Freddie swore under her breath. At least the interview--just the presence of Will and his words--were enough to shock her audience.

Will Graham, before his abduction, had been an annoyance to Freddie, but she could acknowledge that he was a skillful agent and brilliant, too. The man she saw in the years-old interview hunched forward on the couch and spoke so quietly that it was easier to read his lips that hear his voice. Abigail Hobbs had died mostly unscathed by the Ripper, but the Wolf Trap Tapes showed that he had taken chunks of flesh from Will Graham’s body--along with countless liters of blood, a lobe of liver, and a kidney--and the Will in the video wore that abuse. A thick gray sweater and sweatpants concealed the majority of the gnarled white scars that Freddie had seen in the photos on file, but she could see broad scars in the flesh of his left forearm where the sleeve of the sweater rode up. A puckered gash of a scar marked the indentation on Will’s right cheek where the Ripper had forced him to remove a segment of his own face. 

The Ripper liked to watch Will hurt himself. Freddie didn’t know if it was a sex thing or just a being-fucked-up thing, but she’d probably sell it as a fetish in the documentary. People liked sex and death, and they loved both of them at the same time. The Ripper also liked to watch Will murder other people, including the Ripper’s former apprentice Abigail Hobbs. 

_“What was it like to kill Abigail Hobbs?”_ the interviewer asked. It was crass, even for Freddie. Online journalists could be vultures.

 _“He told me to do it,”_ Will rasped. Freddie wrinkled her nose at the sound: listening to Will speak on the video was like watching a dog die--tragic, pathetic, and frightening at the same time.

_“Who did?”_

_“He did. He told me to cut her throat. He said, ‘This is my design.’”_

_“Who is he? Jack Crawford?”_

_“Not Jack. My master. He said to kill her. This is my design.”_

And so he had. Will walked up behind Abigail and cut her throat and her blood had streamed between his fingers while he held her twitching body against his chest. 

It was the kind of thing that stuck with a person. The audiences would adore it. 

  
.....  


The man watched Alana leave Beverly’s apartment from his car across the street. She stepped under a streetlight that illuminated her blue woolen trench coat. It was very fine, by the man’s appraisal, and must have cost her plenty. She had been wearing the same coat when she first found Will Graham in the crawlspace of his home in Wolf Trap. The man had been watching then, too. It was only so long before he needed another ongoing subject for his project. His table was lonely without a consistent guest. 

Alana ducked into her car and pulled away from the curb. Before she turned the corner, the man pressed his polished Italian-leather shoe to the pedal and followed her down the street.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A big hug to my wonderful friend Riley (punkoops on Tumblr) who loves _The Poughkeepsie Tapes_ and asked me to write this fic for them! xoxo kiddo!!


End file.
